Religious Diversity and University Chaplaincy: Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Humanist Chaplaincy in Higher Education

By Gregory W. McGonigle and Eboo Patel

Since the 1990s, the religious diversity of United States universities has increased, with growing numbers of students, faculty, and staff who are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Humanist. To support these demographics, university chaplaincies and spiritual life programs have been expanding beyond their Christian and Jewish compositions to include chaplains and programs for these traditions. Through interviews with these new chaplains, this book examines how these chaplaincies developed, the preparation the chaplains needed, their responsibilities, and the current challenges and the future prospects of these programs. It provides valuable advice for university leaders about how and why to develop spiritual life programs to support today's religious diversity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: May 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9781666798593

Gregory W. McGonigle

Gregory W. McGonigle is dean of religious life and university chaplain at Emory University, where he has built a multifaith team and is designing an interfaith center. He previously developed multifaith programs at Tufts, Oberlin, and UC-Davis. He is a Unitarian Universalist minister and holds degrees in religion from Brown, Harvard, and Boston University. He has been a researcher for the Harvard Pluralism Project and is past president of the National Association of College and University Chaplains.

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Introduction

Over the past twenty years of my career in higher education—as an undergraduate, a divinity student, a campus minister, and now a university chaplain and dean of religious life—the religious and philosophical demographics of students on college and university campuses in the United States have been changing dramatically. When I matriculated at Brown University in the late 1990s, it was in part because of my own religious developments—I had been brought up in a Catholic family, and I chose to attend a Catholic high school to be able to study religion in school. Studying the Bible from the historical critical approach raised many questions for me about my faith, however, while studying American literature introduced me to Transcendentalist authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, whose philosophical themes rooted in the New England region in which I grew up shaped my adolescent mind and values. Their encouragement to seek self-reliance, to pursue firsthand experiences with God, to revere the natural world and the interdependence of life, to work to improve society for the common good, and to appreciate spiritual paths from around the world all became themes that shaped my own religious worldview as I became a young adult.

I went to Brown because I had learned a bit about religions other than Christianity and I wanted to study them in greater depth, and I also wanted to do so in a diverse environment that gave me considerable freedom in the classroom and in my cocurricular life, especially as I began to become more liberal politically and to understand myself as a gay man. Through studies of religions and making new friends at Brown, I began to witness the increasing religious diversity of the United States—Brown was not all Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish like the Massachusetts town in which I had grown up; my classmates were also Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Humanist, and indeed there were many who were simply spiritual or did not claim any religious affiliation at all.

Although, at that time, Brown already had a number of diverse religious student organizations, there was no one group where students of different faiths came together to dialogue and share about their faiths with one another. Therefore, working with Brown’s university chaplain, The Rev. Janet Cooper Nelson, and the Brown Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life, my friends and I formed the Brown Multifaith Council. The Rev. Cooper Nelson was already known for supporting religious diversity in American higher education, and she became our advisor, hosting us for meetings and retreats about interfaith engagement.

My interest in these activities was also fueled by the work of Harvard University Professor Diana Eck, whose Pluralism Project was beginning to document the changing religious landscape of Boston and later the United States. The Pluralism Project began to illustrate how this shifting landscape was changing the faith traditions present as well as the civic lives of communities. In addition to its research, the project promoted the idea of religious pluralism—defined as active engagement with religious diversity in order to build understanding, reduce stereotypes, and foster civic cohesion. Reading Professor Eck’s work so interested me that I applied to lead a group independent study course in the Brown religious studies department, with the goal of adding an opportunity to study contemporary U.S. lived religion and how religions were interacting with one another.

In the course, World Religions in America, we studied the historical development of religions in the United States, starting with Native Peoples’ traditions, and with a special focus on the post-1965 New Immigration and the growing presence of religions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism in the U.S. For our final group project, we began studying newer religious communities locally in Rhode Island, literally mapping and collecting the histories of the first mosques, Sikh gurdwaras, Buddhist centers, and other non-Christian and non-Jewish spiritual centers in Rhode Island.

Most of my undergraduate degree in religious studies had been focused on South Asian religions, but after learning about the Pluralism Project and its potential for connecting religion and with the social ethic of advancing a more pluralistic society, I became increasingly interested in studying contemporary American religious history. At the same time, my personal faith and social justice commitments developed, and I began to discern a vocation to become a Unitarian Universalist minister and a university chaplain. I was accepted to Harvard Divinity School, and I was excited to continue studying religions at one of the most religiously diverse divinity schools in the country.

In my very first days there, the tragedy of September 11, 2001 took place in New York, and soon after that, the initial reports of hate crimes against Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus in its aftermath. It was clear to me that a new era of interfaith learning and engagement would be needed in order to build mutual understanding and promote the values of human dignity, respect, equality, justice, compassion, community, and peace.

Through my studies, I continued to focus on this reality of increasing religious diversity and interaction, and I began to work as a researcher for the Harvard Pluralism Project, continuing and developing the research I had begun on world religions in Rhode Island while at Brown. Through ministerial internships, I witnessed the new religious landscape taking shape in Boston in the populations of the public health centers and hospitals where I interned, and I continued to see this after graduation as well, when I became a campus minister at the University of California at Davis.

From Student to Chaplain

After a congregational internship in the UU Church of Davis, my first ministry position was at a progressive Protestant campus ministry at UC Davis that was responding to 9/11 with a multifaith project—converting a parcel of its land into a multifaith living community for forty students of different faiths to live together, learn, and build friendships. I was hired in part to help develop this campus ministry’s relationships with our multifaith partners—the Hillel center, the Newman Catholic center, a Lutheran Episcopal campus ministry, and the new mosque next door. My work at UC Davis also involved serving on interfaith councils and engaging in various interfaith initiatives, and I learned a great deal more there about religious diversity and interaction.

After three years, I felt called to lead and develop my own multifaith college chaplaincy program, and I was hired as the first multifaith director of the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life at Oberlin College. With this charge, it was my responsibility to support the full religious diversity of the college, including many students who were atheist, agnostic, nonreligious, and spiritual but not religious. During this time, Eboo Patel had founded the organization Interfaith Youth Core in order to make interfaith engagement a more widespread social norm through consulting with colleges and universities. He began working with President Barack Obama to deepen interfaith relations and developed a White House Interfaith Challenge. Getting involved in that challenge encouraged us at Oberlin to form an Interfaith Student Council that became the launchpad for many interfaith initiatives, such as interfaith community service internships and annual interfaith days of service. We also partnered with other campus offices on multicultural initiatives, opened a new Multifaith Center space, and began to explore interreligious and interfaith studies more deeply through a course I taught on interfaith leadership. Additionally, we formalized the college’s first Muslim chaplain position, hosted events with artists and speakers from underrepresented traditions on Oberlin’s campus like Hinduism and developed a thriving Buddhist meditation program.

In 2013, I left Oberlin College for Tufts University, attracted by Tufts’ Universalist heritage and its embrace of a robust model of university chaplaincy to serve the whole university through a team of several staff chaplains of different faiths, which was put in place by a predecessor, The Rev Scotty McLennan. When I arrived, Tufts had four chaplains in addition to my position. These chaplains were Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim, and all worked for the university and shared in interfaith duties.

But not all students felt served—for several years, Tufts had had a strong and growing Humanist community (called the Freethought Society) that had connections with the Harvard Humanist Hub. These students and their alumni supporters desired to have a Humanist chaplain at Tufts. In addition, the Tufts Buddhist Mindfulness Sangha meditation community had been served by several volunteer advisors over time but had never had a paid professional chaplain to lead regular meditation sessions and develop other Buddhist programs and a deeper community.

Similarly, the Africana Protestant community had had a Black Theology Bible study for several years, but they desired to be more connected with the university chaplaincy and have more official support. And Tufts had a sizeable community of Hindus and practitioners of other South Asian religions, who saw other universities like Harvard and MIT that had Hindu affiliates in their chaplaincies. The success and vibrancy of the chaplaincy programs with the communities that did have professional chaplains generated a desire for chaplaincy support from many of these student constituencies and communities. And so, over my years at Tufts, we were able to add chaplain or advisor positions to our staff for each of these communities. These colleagues and our collective work began to have a strong impact on the campus community—reaching beyond spiritual life to support many current university priorities such as diversity and inclusion, wellness, and civic engagement.

This story, and that of the other universities that have been making this journey toward increasing the religious diversity of their university chaplaincy programs, presents the central questions of this book: How have college and university chaplaincies and spiritual life programs been adapting to serve the increasing religious diversity of the United States? In universities where chaplain positions have been added for traditions beyond Christianity and Judaism, how have these positions come to be? For the new chaplains who have taken on these roles, what kind of preparation did they have, and what do they feel they needed? What have been the shapes of the programs they developed, and what have been their main successes and challenges? Additionally, how do these chaplains from newer traditions to U.S. higher education see the future of their traditions and of their work in our new and changing spiritual landscape? And what might that suggest about the religiously diverse and interfaith reality growing in the U.S.?

Responding to a Changing Landscape

This book addresses the fact that the religious and philosophical diversity of American colleges and universities has increased dramatically over the past thirty years, and in many cases, university chaplaincies have not kept pace in terms of the number and types of chaplain positions universities have. Most universities and colleges in the United States that have chaplaincies or offices of religious and spiritual life were founded by Protestants or Catholics, and for most of their histories they have tended to have chaplains of their own traditions serving their campuses.

With the increasing numbers of Catholics and Jews attending Protestant institutions in the last century, many universities added chaplains, chaplaincies, or campus ministries to serve Catholic and Jewish students. However, with the increasing diversity of students who are the children of the post-1965 New Immigration to the U.S. of people from the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, who may be practitioners of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other traditions, many American universities have not yet added chaplains to represent and serve students of these traditions.

At the same time, there is a growing number of students who identify as Humanist, atheist, agnostic, nonreligious, or spiritual but not religious, who may have spiritual needs that are beyond the scope of traditional religion. At a number of institutions, these students have been shown to have a desire for many of the resources and supports that chaplaincies have traditionally provided—spaces of caring community; opportunities for meditation, reflection, and counseling; educational spaces to consider life’s big questions; and pathways to engage in meaningful service and social justice work. There are several campuses where innovative programs to meet the emerging needs of Humanists or of the spiritual but not religious have developed, but they are not yet widespread or widely recognized, documented, and supported.

For educational leaders who would seek to consider developing more diverse spiritual life programs or for students who desire and would seek to advocate for them, very little research currently exists on the development of chaplaincies from these historically underrepresented traditions. The current knowledge regarding the diversification of university chaplaincies mostly exists in the stories of the chaplain leaders who have begun to develop these programs as positions have become needed and been created; however, this knowledge has not been comprehensively documented. The purpose of this book is to collect and share some of these stories in a way that will encourage more university communities to consider diversifying their spiritual life programs based on how this has occurred on different campuses in different contexts.

To explore and present some of the diversity and texture of these stories, I interviewed at least three chaplains of each of these emerging traditions in university chaplaincy in the U.S.—Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Humanism—chaplains who themselves represent different personal backgrounds, different types of institutions, and different regions of the country. Through the stories of how their positions developed, how they came into them, what their work looks like, their achievements and challenges, and their visions for the future, they depict the increasing religious and spiritual diversity of U.S. university campuses and they reveal the benefits that the development of spiritual life programs to reflect and support this diversity can have to the university overall.

How Did We Get Here?

The field of university chaplaincy for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Humanists, and other historically underrepresented religious and philosophical communities in the United States is a growing field but, in most cases, it is still very much in its beginnings. To date, these communities lack a great deal of the infrastructure and support that has been built around Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish university religious life over the past centuries and decades. Historically, the oldest universities and colleges in the United States were founded by Protestants, and often had faculty or staff positions for (Protestant) chaplains or developed them in early years. Later, new waves of immigration and changes in policies led to increasing numbers of Catholics and Jews entering American higher education, and those communities developed ways to supplement the Protestant religious life of universities—often through the development of Newman Catholic centers and Hillel and other Jewish centers—over the past hundred years.

But a similar structure has yet to develop for the growing number of Muslims on today’s university campuses, and except in very few cases, Hindu, Buddhist, and Humanist communities are further behind on such support. Student organizations for these communities often exist and occasionally have volunteer advisors, but without the larger networks, structures, and funding that other traditions have developed, it is difficult to employ the professional chaplaincy staff members who are vital to providing high-quality and effective university religious and philosophical life.

Surveying the Field Today

Much like the increasingly multireligious landscape of the United States before the work of the Harvard Pluralism Project, the diversification of university and college chaplaincy along multireligious lines remains largely an untold story. The microhistories of the development of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Humanist chaplaincies in higher education mostly remain embedded in personal narratives of those who have created and the chaplains who have stepped into these roles. In addition, not much analysis has been done about the development of these new chaplaincies, and this may contribute to the difficulty of developing them and hinder advocacy for them where they do not exist.

I have been fortunate in my career as a director of religious life, university chaplain, and dean of religious life to have been connected with many of those who have helped to move forward the diversification of college and university religious life to date and also those who have begun to occupy these new roles serving historically underrepresented traditions. This has been invaluable as I have worked to expand the spiritual life offerings and programs at the colleges and universities I have served.

The networks offered by the national professional associations of college and university chaplains have been critical to this developing work. Having